And some pictures of the set.
Creating the set, even though a simple one, took a lot longer than I anticipated. I used black velvet draped onto wooden sticks for support, on top of a foamcore floor. The star background is sequins pinned into the velvet with lights pointed to have them reflect. my goal with this background was to keep the 'stars' out of focus so that the would give a nice halo light effect. Unfortunately because of space limitations I didn't get the depth I wanted, but overall I was satisfied with how they turned out. With some adjustments I can see how I could make this light effect work. I was only using two lights for the entire stage, but on my next shoot I will be setting up four, which should give some vast improvements for both the star lighting and character lighting.
The foamcore board was a great solution to pinning my characters in. I was worried at first on how I would support them, as the pin board is wooden and my characters steps are quite small so I wouldn't have been able to used the fixed holes drilled in them. I considered getting some floral foam, but I was unable to find a supplier close by. I feel like the foamcore was actually a better solution because it is more rigid than foam, and repeatedly poking into the floral foam would eventually destroy its support.
Unfortunately halfway through the shoot my set fell over. I had some problems too in keeping the cloth laid out straight, or I didn't notice my pulling it, so the sequins moved. I can fix this by pinning down the cloth in the back and having better supports for the cloth.
I liked the idea of the camera pan, and although it is quite rough, I did like how it worked out. Stephen has shown me a tripod I can use to get a smooth pan, and for the next shoot I will slow it down and ease out slowly.
These are all technical issues that were just affected by the limitations I had on the set. However, what was more of a concern for me was the lack of success in my characters movement. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, my goal for this project was to translate 3D actions into a physical form. Because of the roughness of my models, the secondary actions I had animated into the templates was not very apparent. Another issue was the point of registration, though using Dragon software was extremely helpful with the onion skin and live feed built into it. I think in order to achieve this goal I want I will have to animate more sophisticated movements and characters to see it. I think printing larger models is also important in order just to assemble the models more accurately. Though the question 'why don't you just do this whole thing in 3D' kept arising in my mind, I still want to persevere with further projects. I think my goal is still achievable.
